[Updated January 10, 2008 with story about University of Wisconsin]
Back in May 2007 I talked about the opportunity for alumni associations to deliver web-based e-mail accounts by piggy-backing when schools outsource campus e-mail. The most visible examples are Gmail (bundled with Google Apps for Education), and Windows Live@edu.
As Karine Joly has reported already, Inside Higher Ed's Andy Guess has written a detailed article about whether campus computing leaders could and should move to these outsourced solutions.
[Update: The University of Wisconsin-Madison is considering its options, as reported here:
This matters to advancement professionals because, as Guess mentions, students are arriving on campus with their e-mail provider already selected, their preferences already configured and their online loyalties more or less in place. So even if we provide graduating seniors with an alumni address (via either forwarding or an e-mail account), our newly-minted alumni will forward that address to their existing e-mail address, courtesy of Gmail or Microsoft.
And of course, it seems like you can't discuss campus technology without discussing social networks. Guess quotes Arizona State's CTO Adrian Sannier, pointing out that
some of the questions about outsourcing may soon shift to Facebook, already ubiquitous among college students and with features that many universities have tried to offer in the past. The question won’t be how to replicate it, he said, but how to harness it and “try to see how does that move from a tool that exists outside the university community to one that’s sort of knit into the fabric of the university itself.”
Pretty accurate, although calling Facebook "a tool that exists outside the university" is like calling the United States "a place that exists outside my living room." I don't think we're trying to knit social networks into our universities, I think it's the other way around.
Back in May I wrote:
almost all these services are really just giant databases on the back end, so we can also assume that our online alumni directories and alumni social networks will be powered by Google or a similar engine very soon.
In what may be an early indicator of this, Andy Guess reports that institutions now see
that they can more easily (and more cheaply) manage basic functions by using Web-based software that’s hosted externally. An increasingly popular example is “customer relationship management” software, which colleges use to handle vast contact lists and create profiles of alumni, prospective students and potential donors.
So "software as a service" gains a foothold, which will lead to the kind of database functions that development and alumni professionals need to weave the university (or college or school) into the social networks our students already belong to when they come to campus.
The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan was moving down this path about ten years ago, with the private sector's "customer relationship management" software as a model. But AAUM was ahead of the curve, and the conditions favorable to this kind of transition were not present then. What might drive the alumni relations sector to move in this direction? At least two factors are necessary:
- Access to a completely web-based, commercially viable but highly customizable solution; and
- Central IT managers on campus embracing the outsourcing of core functions.
This path is littered with abandoned campus-wide PeopleSoft and Oracle conversions, but the landscape may be coming more sharply into focus now.
And as an aside, keep an eye on Intelliworks' Orion as a player in this space. Inside Higher Ed has already reported on their plans as well.
